ENL 5227 - Spring 2025 - Faulk

The word “media” wasn’t used to describe communication systems until the 1920s, but Victorian culture was suffused by the concept. This was especially true of its novelists, who utilized the formal device of intrusive, self-reflexive narrators and pioneered new ways of describing urban space and landscapes in a concerted effort to turn the novel into an interactive, immersive media environment of the sort that we’re familiar with today.

In this course, we will study how Victorian writers confronted the new communication technologies of their day. Discussion topics will include how Victorian anxieties over personal and professional obsolescence brought about by mass media reflect our contemporary concerns with AI, the relations between gendered labor and new information tech such as the typewriter and stenograph, and the challenges that photography posed to the conventions of literary realism. Our course reading will include George Eliot’s The Lifted Veil, Anthony Trollope’s The Warden, Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights, and Charles Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities. Our goal will be to gain a more nuanced understanding of the temporality of media and move beyond the conventional understanding that new media merely replaces the old.